Call Me Evil, Let Me Go

A Mother’s Struggle to Save Her Children from a Brutal Religious Cult

Sarah Jones

Copyright

This book is based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed.

HarperElement

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

and HarperElement are trademarks of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

First published by HarperElement 2011

CALL ME EVIL, LET ME GO. Copyright © Sarah Jones 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Sarah Jones asserts the moral right to be identifi ed as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780007433568

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 9780007433575

Version: 2019-10-01

To all my beautiful children and to all the broken

lives that cults have left in their wake

Contents

Copyright

Chapter 1

Shocking Revelations

Chapter 2

My Family and I

Chapter 3

My Life Is Turned Upside Down

Chapter 4

Handed Over to Tadford

Chapter 5

All Work and No Play

Chapter 6

Teenage Marriage

Chapter 7

Traumas of a Young Mother

Chapter 8

The Church Demands

Chapter 9

My Eyes Are Opened

Chapter 10

Escape

Chapter 11

Starting Again

Chapter 12

A Roller-coaster Ride

Chapter 13

On Trial

Chapter 14

A Family Reunited

Chapter 15

Looking Back

Afterword

Exclusive sample chapter

Useful Contacts

Credits

About the Publisher

Chapter 1
Shocking Revelations

The phone rang just as I started cooking spaghetti bolognese for the children’s tea. It was the junior-school head. Even though she knew me well her voice sounded harsh, cold, and formal and my heart immediately started pounding. I could sense that I was in for a telling-off. Again. Without any preamble she said that my son Paul had been very naughty at school that afternoon. He had been messing around with some other boys after football, throwing the caked mud that had collected on their boots everywhere and, worst of all, he had even thrown a piece into another boy’s face, cutting him slightly and making him cry. She told me I had to ‘deal with him’ at home.

I thought her formality was a bit over the top and asked if there had been any teachers in the changing room while this was going on. She admitted there hadn’t been, and I thought to myself that it wasn’t too much to worry about and that boys will be boys. Even so, I was gripped with tension. I knew only too well that being told to ‘deal with him’ was an unspoken order to smack Paul. He, along with his sister Rebecca and his brothers Luke and Daniel, went to Tadford School, a small establishment that belonged to Tadford Charismatic Church in the south of England.

The Charismatic movement is not a church in itself, but includes many different churches. Its members believe that faith must be deeply felt rather than just experienced through ritual. Tadford was under the overall control of its founder and pastor, Ian Black, and was unlike any other church. He was a controversial, powerful, supremely confident man who regularly preached that it was important to break a child’s will early and believed in corporal punishment.

I had grown used to being told what to do by the Church leaders, and especially Ian Black, ever since my parents had placed me in their care years earlier, when I was in my mid-teens. I’d been desperate not to be uprooted from my family home in a small market town in the Pennines, to board at Tadford, as it was far too far away from family and friends, but my well-meaning parents, particularly my mother Pamela, were worried that what they saw as my increasingly rebellious teenage behaviour meant I was on a slippery downward path. They believed that a school with strict religious guidelines, firm discipline and an inflexible routine would do me good.

Although my feisty spirit had largely been squashed over the years, it had never quite been extinguished and I had a reputation for not always toeing the line. But the phone call on that cold November evening shook me to the core and I was anxious to get away. ‘OK, I’ll deal with it’, I said, then put down the phone.

I knew the head was right, in that Paul had been naughty, but I thought it was just the sort of silly thing a boy of his age might do, especially when no teacher was present. I also wondered why I hadn’t been told about it when I collected Paul from school. I glanced at my watch. It was just after 5 p.m. I knew I had better sort Paul out before my husband Peter came home from work as he was likely to be far tougher on Paul than I would be.

I called Paul. ‘Will you come into Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom, please,’ I said, trying not to let my anxiety show in my voice. ‘I want to speak to you.’ I didn’t want to punish him in front of his siblings.

Paul was struggling with his homework in the bedroom he had to share with Rebecca. He had dysgraphia, a writing disorder, and the help the school had given him had, six months earlier, suddenly been withdrawn without warning or explanation, and as a result he was finding schoolwork much harder.

I told him about the phone call, and he admitted that he, along with some of his friends, had been silly. It wasn’t, he insisted, just his fault. I listened carefully to his explanation and told him he had been naughty. I then pulled down his trousers and underpants and gave him two quick smacks with my hand on his bare bottom. After that I cuddled him tightly, pleased that he didn’t cry. I hated smacking him, but I knew that if I didn’t Peter would and it would be far worse.

As all four children ate their supper Paul didn’t seem at all concerned about being smacked. No more was said until a couple of hours later when Peter arrived home from a nearby town, where he was working as a fitness coach. Peter and I were not getting on well. We had married when I was only 18 and very naive. He was several years older than me and, if possible, even more innocent, but the Church encouraged its young members to marry early, so we did what was expected of us. I always felt suspicious that ours was an arranged match, but I had genuinely come to love Peter. I also knew I was lucky to have a husband at all, because you could only marry within the Church and there weren’t always enough young men to go round.

Sadly our marriage had recently become little more than an empty shell. Peter seemed to be permanently in a bad temper and was hardly at home, choosing instead to spend any spare time – when he wasn’t working late at the fitness centre – helping out in the Church. Soon after he got back from work I told him what had happened at school, and made a point of adding that I had dealt with Paul and smacked him. Peter ignored my comments, went straight to find Paul and took him into our bedroom, grabbing as he did so a squash racquet that was lying by the door. He then smacked Paul’s bare bottom several times with it.

I was mortified. Paul was our first child, but still our baby. He needed our protection, not our anger. When it was over he went straight back to the bedroom he shared with Rebecca without saying a word. He stayed there for the rest of the evening, and wouldn’t speak to me when I tucked him up for the night. Paul and I had always been close and his silence was like a dagger in my heart. He might have been brave enough not to cry, but I wasn’t. I wept for him. I thought it was totally wrong to hit him like that, and couldn’t bear the thought of his pain, but I knew from experience it was pointless to say anything to Peter, let alone criticize him. If I protested he was likely to fly into a rage. But I hated myself for being so weak.

I knew if I confronted Peter he’d also tell Ian Black, who ran the Church with a rod of iron, what had happened, and he would certainly haul me into his grand office and go through his usual emotional battering. This included telling me in very strong language that I was rebellious, or worse. Although he was a religious leader he didn’t mind his language, and it seemed to me that he enjoyed trying to undermine me.

Paul was still very subdued the next day, a Friday, but went to school without any fuss. When I collected him in the afternoon he told me, with no apparent emotion, that he had been ‘whacked’ – beaten with a shoe that was kept in the classroom and used to hit children if they disobeyed one of the school’s many rules. I was furious that he had been beaten without my knowledge or agreement. It meant that my poor little boy had been punished not once, not twice, but three times for the same, not very serious, offence.

I was cross that none of the teachers told me what had happened when I was picking Paul up, but shortly after we got home, the phone rang. It was Patricia, one of his teachers, who told me officially that he had been smacked. I was so angry I gave her short shrift. I said that I had been specifically told by the head to deal with Paul’s punishment at home and that, contrary to what was the school’s normal procedure, I hadn’t been told in advance that he would be hit, nor had I given anyone permission to do so. She didn’t say much and the conversation was quickly over.

I felt desperately sorry for Paul. He seemed withdrawn and uncommunicative, so I gave him lots of extra attention. When Peter came home that evening I told him how annoyed I was that the school had disciplined him after clearly saying they would leave it to me. He barely reacted. His uncle and aunt, who had brought him up after his parents had been killed in a boating accident, were founder members of the Church and he believed that anything the Church did was automatically right whereas any opinion I voiced against it was automatically wrong.

Paul went to school as usual on Saturday. He had lessons in the morning, played football in the afternoon, then had a violin lesson and choir practice. On Sunday morning and evening he came with the rest of the family to church. It was an utterly miserable weekend. Paul barely spoke a word the whole time. I felt totally distraught that I had let him down. He had been treated so appallingly that I wanted to take him out of the school immediately. But realistically I knew it wasn’t an option. It was compulsory for all members of the Church to send their children to the Church school. Any other course of action was unthinkable.

But as the days passed, Paul’s unfairly harsh punishment weighed increasingly heavily on me and I began to feel that the Church had taken away not just my control over my child but also my parental rights. In addition, I slowly started to realize that it wasn’t just my children they were in control of, but that my own mind, body and emotions were being run by the Church.

I’d never thought about it with such clarity before, but the incident prompted me to wonder how I had accepted as inevitable something as wrong as hitting children. It made me feel terrible. I was very maternal and adored my children, yet I was unable to protect them or even have the support of their father. I was desperate to talk my anxieties through with someone, but didn’t know where to turn. My life, like those of nearly all the Church members, was centred entirely on Tadford Charismatic Church. I was cut off from my family and former friends and had nowhere to go to express my concern or get help.

Tadford actively discouraged members from associating with anyone who wasn’t part of the community. We were repeatedly told that the world outside the Church was a horrendous place and that there were no true Christians except those who came to Tadford, not even Christians who attended other churches. On the rare occasions the idea of leaving the Church fleetingly crossed my mind, I was instantly enveloped by a paralysing fear and put it right out of my thoughts. Over the years, Black had given his congregation many examples of individuals who had left the Church subsequently being struck down by God and I believed to my core that if I left I too would die. So although it was now clear to me that something was wrong with a Church that believed in corporal punishment, I couldn’t take it any further. Instead I tried to immerse myself in making improvements to our new house. I loved creating a nest for my family and, although it didn’t change anything fundamentally, it worked on one level as a diversion.

Several weeks passed and one Tuesday afternoon I decided to go into a nearby town to buy some curtain material for the twins’ new bedroom. It was market day and I took along my friend Megan, another Church member, who was older than me and had kindly offered to make the curtains. I bought some fabric with thin blue, red and white stripes for the twins’ room and another with a design of leaping dolphins for the bathroom. Neither was expensive and I came home feeling very pleased.

The following day I was called into Black’s office. This usually meant trouble and I assumed it was something to do with my work. All adult Church members had to put in many hours of ‘voluntary’ work for the Church. I’d had various jobs and was now recording and editing the pastor’s sermons and his regular sessions of what he called ‘miracle healing’.

I worked while the children were at school, in the evenings after they went to bed, at weekends and when the Church arranged conferences. Not surprisingly, I felt permanently exhausted. As soon as I arrived at Black’s office he told me off about a faulty recording I had produced. Then, to my astonishment, he turned his attention to my recent shopping trip. Although all my four children were of school age, he asked how dare I go off without permission, leaving ‘others’ to look after them. I explained I went to get curtain material for our new home, but he repeated that I had no right to do so without asking first. It was absurd. I had gone in my free time, while the children were at the school, for which we paid fees, and the ‘others’ he referred to were in fact their teachers.

I was often intimidated by Black, but on this occasion I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman and I’m still being treated like the teenage girl I was when I first arrived. I can’t carry on like this.’ Later I found out that Megan didn’t get into trouble for coming with me.

The trouble was, I couldn’t think of a concrete plan to change my situation. I consoled myself with the thought that, largely thanks to my job recording Black’s sermons, at least my eyes were open now in that I was more aware of how the Church operated. His ‘miracle healing’ events regularly took place on a Sunday, when individuals of different ages who were suffering from a range of illnesses, including arthritis and cancer, would come to the Church in the desperate hope that they would be healed. The routine was that, at various points in the two-hour assembly, Black would choose a few of these invalids to talk to. He would use a hand-held microphone to record what he was saying, then ask what was wrong with them. Regardless of the malady, he would tell them almost immediately that they had been cured.

If, for example, they had a problem walking he would firmly take their hand, pull them from their seat, and then half drag them forward and back in front of the congregation at an ever-faster pace until they were almost running, claiming loudly throughout that Jesus had cured them. The mood of these meetings was highly charged and intensely emotional, and the sick, their loved ones and many members of the congregation would almost always weep.

I noticed that Black was careful not to claim that he did the healing himself, but the way he spoke and behaved made it easy to assume that Jesus was using him as the conduit for the ‘miracle’ to take place.

It was my job to record these traumatic sessions, edit them and add any necessary sound effects, and produce a half-hour CD that the Church could sell to the general public. To make sure I encapsulated the essence of the occasion, I had to spend a lot of time studying how Black worked and what he said. As a result I became acutely aware of his techniques and choice of language. His voice was constantly on my computer’s speakers (I did my editing with some software I had bought) and, almost imperceptibly, he gradually lost his hold on me. As he did so I began increasingly to think for myself. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because for so many years I believed Jesus used Black to talk to us and express His wishes. I felt that God Himself was eternally grateful that Black was alive. This gave Black massive power and inhibited a very ordinary person like me from questioning such a man about any area of his life.

Once I developed some distance I watched and listened to him more objectively and became increasingly cynical about his ‘miracle cures’, particularly as I would also often have to interview these sick people after their sessions with him to get some words of testimony from them. This meant I saw for myself that his claims that they were cured weren’t true. Although some managed to walk or run with Black in the heat of the moment, their problems always returned a couple of days later.

Because I had to edit Black’s sermons I became very familiar with his expressions and speech patterns. I listened as he ruthlessly criticized people who weren’t in the Church, dismissed those who were getting old, peppered some sermons with sexual innuendo and regularly made serious allegations, often of a sexual nature, about individuals, most of which I didn’t believe at all. My job was to make the sermons respectable for public consumption. I made sure I deleted his sexual innuendo and slanderous comments. Ironically, spending my formative years in a strict cult had left its moral mark and I didn’t think it was right for any Christian to talk in such a negative way about any individual and it was certainly not how a religious leader should think, let alone behave.

The finished CDs were meant to enhance Black’s reputation and bring in new members. They were also a useful source of income as they were sold in the Church shop or sent out via mail order from the Church catalogue. Bit by bit, my resentment spread to other areas of my life and once I began to question Black’s behaviour I started to resent and reject the Church’s overall control of what I did, said and felt. For example, I couldn’t watch TV soaps because Black described them as evil. Nor was I allowed to listen to secular music, either modern or classical, as Black said it contained evil spirits. The exception was the music of Bach, whom Black described as being a true Christian. Instead, Church members were encouraged to spend their spare time listening to CDs of him preaching.

Peter and I even had to ask permission to go on holiday. Not that we went very often. We were too busy working for the Church, and besides had no spare money. Like all members, we were expected to hand over tithes, which were at least a tenth of our gross salary, to the Church, give additional amounts for ‘special occasions’ and pay hefty school fees. I couldn’t even freely choose what I or my children wore. Respectable women of the Church weren’t allowed to wear trousers, a skirt above the knee, or show even a hint of cleavage, and the children had to be dressed in tweeds and blazers like little adults.

My birthday was approaching and, as happened every year near that time, it was an opportunity to take stock. I felt that in many ways I had grown and matured, but in others I was still being treated like a child. It annoyed me. I didn’t want to be told what I could and couldn’t do and how I should think any more, but working out how to change this was too big a reality for me to contemplate. I just knew I couldn’t carry on in the same way. The main problem was that I had so little experience of making decisions. Most people learn about decision-making gradually as they grow up. But I had been emotionally pummelled into obedience during my most formative years by Black and other senior members of the Church. I had almost no control over my life or my children.

Not that I dared mention what I felt to a soul. I couldn’t confide in Peter, who, when he wasn’t working long hours at his day job, spent his time at the Church, or in a single friend, as anything I said would have gone straight back to Black, and I was terrified of him and the power he had over me. I badly needed to explore my fledgling thoughts. I wanted to find out if anyone else felt the same as I did and, like me, longed to be comforted or reassured. Instead I bottled up everything deep inside me, kept my inner turmoil completely hidden and somehow dealt with it all myself. It was particularly difficult as I’m naturally gregarious, but for the moment to behave differently seemed as difficult as swimming against a tidal wave. Even if you slightly criticized either an ordinary member of the Church or one of the elders, everyone got to hear about it and you could be ostracized. The prospect was too awful to contemplate and I likened it to solitary confinement. I couldn’t risk that as my whole life revolved around the Church. I had barely seen my parents or my sister during my years away and didn’t feel close to them. I had no other adult contacts outside – everything of my pre-Church life had been severed. I had nowhere to go. Nor, I realized when I thought pragmatically about my situation, did I have any money of my own.

It was a huge struggle but I managed to keep my thoughts to myself until one day, about five months after Paul had been beaten, I was on my way to the recording room after I’d taken the children to school, when I bumped into another Church member, Susan. We started talking and she daringly grumbled that she wasn’t allowed to go on a holiday when she wanted to. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘This place is just like a bloody cult.’

I had never heard the Church described like that, and it had never crossed my mind in all the years I had been at Tadford that what I was trapped in, and controlled by, had the characteristics of a cult. I wasn’t even absolutely sure what a cult was. I didn’t say anything to Susan, because my head went into a complete spin and alarm bells began to ring so loudly in my ears I felt I would explode.

When I calmed down a little I remembered that there was a Christian bookshop in town that we weren’t allowed to go to. Black had told us it was evil because it was run by Christians who weren’t members of Tadford. Perhaps, I thought, the answers to the thousand of questions that were flooding my brain could be there. I rushed into the recording room, which was in a small room in the church.

My friend Kath, who had been at Tadford for just over a year, was helping out that day and was already hard at work editing the recording of the recent spring conference. Instead of saying ‘Hello’, I almost barked at her, ‘Pack up. We’re going out.’ We locked the room and when I whispered our destination in her ear her eyes opened wide, but she saw how intense I was and didn’t say a word.

Bearing in mind that we weren’t allowed to go out without permission and I had no idea if Kath would be on my side, I was taking a big risk. I certainly hadn’t thought it through. It was as if something more powerful than myself was pushing me forward. Part of me was in a complete panic, but there was also a quiet but firm voice in my brain telling me that Kath always seemed to keep her own counsel and I should trust my instinct. We got into my car and I drove into the centre of town as if my life depended on it, which indeed I felt it did. I was convinced that at any second God would strike me dead because I wasn’t doing His will. There could be no greater sin than deliberately disobeying orders and going to a bookshop run by people who would surely go to Hell. Sooner or later that would be my destination too, I thought, even if I were lucky enough to be spared for the next half-hour. My dicing with fate seemed more dangerous than leaping off Mount Everest blindfolded on a dark, freezing night. Utter madness. My choice of destination would also inevitably mean I would lose my children to the secular world – something I’d repeatedly been told was a fate worse than death. It didn’t occur to me to question what type of God could be so capricious as to strike you down for going to a bookshop without permission.

I was shaking like a leaf by the time I arrived in town and parked by the bookshop. I looked around, half expecting to see a celestial firing squad lined up on the pavement waiting for me. There was nothing. I was equally relieved to see no one I knew nearby. As we walked into the bookshop I took a deep breath. My heart was beating incredibly fast. I wanted to get out as soon as possible and try to save my life. I looked desperately along the shelves, at first too scared to focus or read any of the titles. Then suddenly my eyes lighted on a slim white book entitled When a Church Becomes a Cult, by Stephen Wookey. I looked quickly around for Kath, pulled her over, pointed at the book and with shaking hands took two copies off the shelves. I gave her one and we each paid for our own copy. Then I drove back to Tadford as fast as I could, feeling a strange mixture of terror and exhilaration as I quickly prayed for my life to be spared.

I dared not go home in case someone spotted me, reported me to Black and I was hauled into his office and asked why I wasn’t working. So I suggested to Kath that we go back to the recording room. She agreed and as soon as we were safely inside we locked the door. It was something I did when I had a lot to do and didn’t want to be disturbed, so in itself that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. If someone should knock on the door and want to speak to either of us for whatever reason, I decided, I would sit on the book. Kath and I then sat at adjacent desks and began reading our books. I took a green highlighter and marked the sentences that meant something to me. There were so many I nearly ran out of ink. I also began crying so much I could hardly breathe. I have never read anything so fast, but it was vital to dash through it before anyone disturbed us. At the same time I couldn’t skip a single word. The contents mesmerized me and I recognized an enormous amount of similarity between what was being described in the book and my life at Tadford. As I turned each page I realized more and more clearly what sort of place I was in. It felt as if I were being given a powerful electric shock that was reawakening the real me that had been crushed for so many years. My reaction was that everything about my life at Tadford was completely shattered and that I had been part of one big lie. I saw with rare clarity that I had to get out. The only question was: how?

Chapter 2
My Family and I

I was born Sarah Alice Weston, the third child and second daughter of Pamela and John Weston. My father worked as an electrician in the Merchant Navy, my mother was a florist. Home was a spacious three-storey, semi-detached, five-bedroom house with a large garden in a market town in the Pennines.

Apart from me, my family consisted of Kerry, who was 11 when I was born, and Roy, 12. My sister was easy-going and well behaved, but there was something not quite right about my brother. I couldn’t have known then that he was to affect my life profoundly.

Roy was by all accounts an adorable baby and grew into a bright, intelligent little boy much praised for his all-round ability by his teachers at his local school. My doting parents took great pride in his success, and not too much notice when his teachers added that he was a bit of a loner and didn’t mix well. He was, after all, the first child in our family and Mum didn’t know what to expect. She assumed he was taking after her and she was not one to go out with a crowd of girls. She didn’t even worry that he kept himself to himself at home too, putting it down to the fact that he was behaving like any boy with two younger sisters.

Certainly Roy didn’t take much notice of me when I arrived, but Kerry was delighted to have a little sister. Roy’s life and that of my family changed dramatically almost overnight one day when I was just a sweet, bubbly toddler. Many parents worry about their child turning into Kevin, the iconic teenager created by comedian Harry Enfield, when they reach their teens, but Roy’s transformation was far more extreme. He stopped being the loving lad who was good at so many things, and turned into an impossible rebel with an explosive temper who screamed and shouted at the least thing.

He used to be immaculate and tidy, but became extremely scruffy and left his bedroom in a terrible mess. Worst of all he no longer wanted to go to school and began playing truant. It was shortly after his birthday that we had the first clear sign that something was seriously wrong. He was playing rock music so loudly in his bedroom that the house started to reverberate. Dad went in and asked him to turn the volume down. To his horror, instead of replying Roy jumped up and down on his bed with his fingers in his ears, screaming. Now, when most children of that age start screaming in a tantrum they stop pretty quickly afterwards, but Roy scream lasted for over ten minutes. It was then that my parents knew for certain that their son’s behaviour had gone beyond that of even the most difficult teenager.

Mental health was very poorly handled in the sixties and seventies, with little diagnosis and even less support. When my parents took Roy to see our trusted family GP they believed everything he said implicitly and didn’t query his diagnosis that Roy was just a typical adolescent. He said that, of course, it was unusual behaviour, but ‘these things happen and they shouldn’t worry’. They did worry, of course, and felt very guilty about his obvious unhappiness, racking their brains to remember something they might have done that triggered this change in him. But they couldn’t come up with anything.

Roy was particularly awful when my widowed maternal grandma came to live with us that year. He started screaming at her so much her that my parents dared not leave her alone with him and, although we all wanted Grandma to stay with us permanently, after a few months Mum and Dad felt she had to leave for her own safety. Roy also insisted on eating his meals alone in his bedroom, which upset Mum and Dad greatly because we liked to eat together as a family.

Over time, Roy’s behaviour grew even worse and he spent ever longer periods alone in his room. Kerry, who is now an occupational therapist working in Canada, worried that he didn’t have any friends and lived in an imaginary world where he often put himself in charge of military battles. Although some days passed calmly, the unpredictability of his moods and his anti-social behaviour kept me on a knife edge of anxiety. I never knew when he was going to start screaming again and hated the stormy and tense atmosphere at home. It was like living with a time bomb. Kerry sometimes locked herself in her bedroom when she heard him shouting and we all felt increasingly scared.

As well as making life difficult for me and Kerry, Roy was also wearing Mum and Dad down. They nevertheless tried to look for positive things about his behaviour and took heart when he visited Uncle Roger, Dad’s brother, who lived in a nearby village, because it put him in a better mood. Sadly, once he was back home, he’d usually run up to his bedroom, put a record on and start on his screaming all over again.

He also enjoyed coming on our family weekend camping trips to sites in the North York Moors. We had a large tent with a separate section for each of us. Roy seemed happier in the fresh air, and nothing like as disruptive as he was at home.

Although I was too young to have any real concept of what was going on, I could sense the dark cloud that hung over the family. I was so frightened of Roy’s strange behaviour I often shook like a leaf. My parents did their best and took him back to the doctor countless times. They tried a child psychiatrist too, but, as extraordinary as it may seem, his diagnosis remained the same – a bad case of adolescent behaviour – and they were told repeatedly that the best way to deal with their son was to keep reassuring him of their love. Dad even took up kite-flying so that he and Roy could share an activity together, but it failed as Roy would always intentionally get their kites entangled, which was disheartening to Dad, to put it mildly.

One example of his strange behaviour occurred at one of my birthday parties. Dad was in hospital after a fall aboard ship when he’d hit his head on a bulwark, and was expected to stay in for two weeks, but Mum invited twelve little friends round for me and prepared egg, banana and ham sandwiches, jelly and ice cream, and a birthday cake with pink icing. I was very excited but sad too that Dad wasn’t with us. It was hard work for Mum to do on her own, but she organized lots of fun games, like Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs. We were all having a lovely time when, about halfway through the party, Roy came out of his bedroom, walked down the stairs and threw his dinner of meat, potatoes and lots of gravy right across the room. He then started yelling unintelligibly before going back to his room. I was petrified and so upset that my special day was ruined.

Dad’s niece Belinda, who had brought her daughter, who was my age, along to join in the fun, was really shocked too. She’d never seen Roy behave like that before and said she’d had no idea that he could be so awful. I could tell Mum was really upset as she cleared up his mess from all over the carpet and armchairs. When everyone had gone home she put me in the bath, read me a story and tried to settle me down for the night. I was still quite disturbed, so it all took a while.

When peace finally reigned, Mum wondered yet again what she and Dad could have done to Roy that he hated them so much, and why such a loving child now seemed like a stranger. She also felt very nervous about what he might do next, but eventually went to bed. She woke up in the small hours with an anxious start, feeling that everything was hopeless. Grandma, whom she loved very much, had died several months previously and she was still in mourning for her. She was also worried about Dad in hospital. It all seemed too much and suddenly she felt she couldn’t cope a moment longer. She’d been prescribed Mogadon, a sleeping pill, by the doctor because of the strain she was under and on impulse swallowed all twenty or so tablets left in the container. She left a note on the mantelpiece for Kerry, saying she had gone away, and when we woke up we should all go to our next-door neighbour, whom we knew very well.

She then got into our trusty Morris Traveller and drove off with no idea where she was going. All she knew was that she had to get away. She was not fit to drive and went through several red lights, although luckily there was no one about. Two miles further on the car stalled, which somehow half brought her to her senses. She realized she had to get help, got out of the car and walked unsteadily towards a stationary ambulance parked at the side of the road. The driver got out at the same time and, as fate would have it, it was one of her friends, Billy. When he asked her why she was out in the middle of the night, she told him she had taken an overdose. He immediately drove her to the local hospital in his ambulance, which fortunately was empty.

Mum didn’t have to wait long in Casualty. Her stomach was pumped and she was given a bed in one of the wards, but she couldn’t sleep and lay shaking and shivering all night. She was in such a state that she didn’t think about us poor children left behind, who would wake up with neither parent at home.

Before she was discharged later that morning, she rang a neighbour to ask her to drive her home, and decided not to tell Dad what happened until he came out of hospital. She was in no fit state to go and see him and, so that he didn’t worry, left a message with the nurse on his ward that she wasn’t very well and couldn’t visit him for a couple of days.

When Dad got home he was very shocked and upset to hear what had really happened, but by then Mum was feeling much brighter. Dad had always been an upright, hard-working man who tried to be the husband and father that we could all rely on, but the strain of living with a seriously disturbed teenager was taking its toll on him too. Several days after Mum was discharged, he snapped.

Mum had organized a family Halloween party, hoping Roy would join in the fun. Kerry and I were having a great time, roaring with laughter as we ducked apples and played party games. Roy refused to join in and started annoying us by putting his fingers in his ears and screaming. As we were so used to this by now it wasn’t a big deal for us, but it was the last straw for Dad, who broke down in floods of tears. This was so out of character for him that Mum called the doctor, who diagnosed a nervous breakdown caused by stress. He prescribed tranquillizers and Dad took a month off work.

Dad had at that time left the Merchant Navy and had been building up his own electrical business, fixing televisions, radios and the like, and occasionally rewiring houses for friends. It was going very well but Roy’s erratic behaviour had become too much for him. He couldn’t concentrate on his work and sold the business, which was a pity. Instead he got a job as an electrician at a school in a nearby town, and we bought a four-bedroom semi-detached house close by.

Roy refused to go to school following that incident at my birthday party and, after a nightmare year of having him at home, all our hearts lifted when he suddenly told Mum and Dad that he wanted to follow in Dad’s footsteps and join the Merchant Navy. He had been a naval cadet at school and enjoyed it, so we were delighted with his choice. Although we worried a bit about how someone who had such difficulties socially would cope with the other cadets, overall we felt that at long last there was light at the end of the tunnel.

The mood of the house always lifted when Roy wasn’t around and this time Mum, who had been so focused on him, started to give us girls, and especially me, more attention. But far from feeling neglected, I enjoyed it when I wasn’t the focus of Mum’s attention. Instead I had a free, unrestricted childhood, although at times I bubbled over with too much energy and curiosity and was probably a thorn in my elder sister’s sides.

Two years after Roy joined the Merchant Navy he was discharged on medical grounds, no doubt because he was acting bizarrely, and our family life once again became a roller-coaster ride. Mum and Dad thought that perhaps he would be happier if we moved to a different house in another part of the Pennines, one that didn’t have so many bad memories for him – and for us. So Dad got a job as an electrician at a technical college, and we soon settled into a four-bedroom house in a charming village. Unfortunately the move didn’t change Roy’s behaviour at all.

I loved being at the new primary school in the village. The teachers were great and made everything fun. I went to Brownies and the Christian Union, enjoyed gymnastics and was quite a tomboy. I had loads of friends, both in the village and at school. I loved climbing trees and fighting with boys but I especially liked going to the local forest to collect the cartridge cases left behind by clay-pigeon shooters. They were all sorts of different colours and I lined them up on the window sill in my bedroom. That summer my friends and I saw a wild horse in a field and the farmer said that whoever could ride it could keep it. We tried all summer but none of us managed to mount the horse, let alone ride it.

Another favourite pastime was our family camping holidays, particularly when our relatives came to join us. Best of all was going fishing with Dad. He was a true family man, a passive and loving father who was very funny and never once smacked me. He had an enduring passion for Austin Minis and, to add to his rather modest income as an electrician, he would often have up to six of them, belonging to various friends, in our garden waiting for him to repair them.

At that time religion wasn’t playing a big part in family life. Mum occasionally went to the local Anglican church and even became a Sunday School teacher for a short while, but she found neither peace nor comfort there. Instead both Mum and Dad turned to alcohol as a way of finding relief. They felt better once they were drunk, even though everything became twice as bad the next morning when they were hung-over. On Fridays they drank all night. It was well before the licensing laws changed, so they started at the pub and when it closed they moved on to the nearest hotel with a late-night licence. Dad drank beer and Mum drank white wine. Dad was regularly downing at least eight pints during a session, and by the time he came home he was absolutely reeling and as daft as a brush. He was also chain-smoking and on a Friday would get through about sixty cigarettes during the evening.

Alcohol became Mum’s anaesthetic: it helped drown her sorrows and stopped her thinking. I was still young when I became aware that my parents were drinking heavily. Soon after we moved to the Pennine village Mum invited the local vicar to tea. I told him that Mum had been really drunk the previous night. He didn’t respond, no doubt because he was trying to be tactful, so I kept saying it and the more Mum tried to shut me up the more I went on and on. His visit didn’t last long.

One of the nicest things about our move was to discover we lived close to a large limestone quarry. As well as being able to play amongst the rocks and pools of the quarry – rather dangerously perhaps, but this was the era before our modern obsession with health and safety – the quarry-workers’ families were very friendly and soon began inviting us to various parties. I had countless sleepovers with lots of children in various family bedrooms and it was enormous fun. I was very proud that, although I was one of the youngest there, I was put in charge of making toast for all the children in the morning.

Mum and Dad occasionally went to the local hotel for a posh dinner, and I loved looking at Mum when she was beautifully made up and wearing a smart dress, and thought she was absolutely stunning. When we were at home the family liked to play cards and above all Pit. It’s a very old game that simulates the activities on the floor of the stock market, and specifically the commodities market. Everyone would yell out the number of cards they wanted to trade at the same time, and the action was fast and furious. There was so much laughter and shouting going on that I got really cross when my parents sent me to bed, especially as I couldn’t sleep for ages because of the noise.

These light-hearted interludes brightened our mood for a short time but didn’t provide a permanent solution to the nightmare we had with Roy. He kept thinking people were after him and often woke me at night with his shouting. Although I had my own bedroom I often rushed into my parents’ room, where I’d lie on the floor beside their bed, almost too scared to breathe. Sometimes Mum gave me warm milk with a drop of brandy in it to help calm me down. At other times it was really so unpleasant for me to be in our house that Dad called one of our neighbours and asked if I could stay there for the night.

It was around that time that Mum decided once again that life was too much and she couldn’t cope with Roy. She’d been secretly going into his room and taking a handful of Valium, which she washed down with sherry, but this time she deliberately took too many and I came home from school to find her flat out on the floor of her bedroom. I was very scared and shook her hard. When she still didn’t move, I rang Dad at the college and, after a long wait for him to be found, was eventually put through to him. He rushed home and I stood with my back against the wall in the corner of the bedroom, barely daring to breathe, as I watched him slap her face to try to bring her round. Before long the ambulance arrived and she was taken to hospital. I was completely traumatized by what I had seen and had awful nightmares. Yet I don’t think it was a serious suicide attempt. It was more a sign of her desperation and her way of blotting everything out. She was again discharged within a day and not given any medication or a further appointment.

It was the last straw and finally Dad decided, with a heavy heart, that Roy had to move out as he was very worried about the damaging effect his behaviour was having on the rest of us. But it was one thing coming to a decision and quite another finding the courage to tell Roy to his face. He was so volatile it could have easily triggered a serious outburst.

Dad eventually mustered up courage, explained to Roy that he was being rather disruptive and told him gently that he had to go. He added that he was a much-loved son and although we couldn’t have him living with us all the time, he wasn’t banning him from visiting us. To our surprise Roy wasn’t at all bothered and shortly afterwards moved into a squat in a local town that was frequented by homeless people and drug addicts. Life calmed down and one summer’s day Roy came round to tell Mum and Dad that he had found what he described as a ‘fantastic new church’ close to where he was squatting. He asked Mum if she’d like to come with him. She immediately said yes and seemed so happy to find something she could do with Roy that could give them a shared interest and topic of conversation.

Bethesda Charismatic Church was run by Pastor Edmund Collins, a charming, modest young man of 28, who had been building up the congregation from scratch. Mum found her first visit rather strange. She was an Anglican and found the hymns were very different to those to which she was accustomed. The congregation also clapped, which she was not used to. Nor had she ever shouted out ‘Halleluiah’ before. But the service lifted her spirits and helped her feel peaceful, and she believed that God was there for her to cling on to.

After a few more visits she tried to persuade the rest of the family to join her. Kerry refused, while Dad was so deeply into drink and anti-religion that he said he’d rather spend his time at the pub. But I went along. It was a lovely, lively service, much friendlier than the Anglican church, and I even started going to the Sunday School. Mum became a regular churchgoer and soon wouldn’t miss a single Sunday service. She told us that she could sense God’s presence within her, felt safe in His hands and suddenly for the first time believed our family would come through our difficult times.

Chapter 3
My Life Is Turned Upside Down

There was an amazing change in Mum once she started going regularly to church. She seemed to cope with life much better and Dad felt he could at last go out with peace of mind, knowing there wouldn’t be any more overdoses. Her habits changed too. Mum and Dad regularly went to the pub on a Sunday night, but since Mum found Jesus she usually went to church instead and on the rare occasions she did keep Dad company, she had orangeade rather than white wine.

We all felt better when Mum was calmer and were pleased to see how well she was getting on with Pastor Collins. He told her all about a conference he attended nearby organized by the Divine Congregation, a cooperative fellowship that was spreading the Evangelical message in Britain. He was particularly enthusiastic about Troy Tyson, who he said was a marvellous Canadian missionary who was currently visiting various British churches. He had invited him and another young pastor, Ian Black, whom Tyson had taken under his wing, to speak in the towns and villages of the Pennines. He thought Mum would very much enjoy hearing them preach.

Little did any of us know that this would be an encounter that would change all our lives, and especially mine. Mum went along and was totally absorbed by the service, Black’s powerful sermon and the way he singled out individuals, most often women, to pray for their health. She told us she thought he was a wonderful man and very close to Jesus.

Nor was she alone. Rob Jarvis, one of our close friends and usually very down-to-earth, was equally taken with Black, who was, despite the power of his sermons, a short, stocky and sickly looking man. He described Black, who used to work for the Gas Board as a sales manager but who was now an evangelist, albeit with no formal religious qualifications, as someone with a personality that connected with people’s search for God and believed that women, in particular, would be captivated by his authority and power and not be bothered that he wasn’t particularly good-looking.

Ian Black’s first appearance was such a resounding success that he returned each month to preach, staying overnight with various members. Edmund Collins supported him with a good Christian spirit and didn’t feel threatened when he heard that Black had created an organization called the Society of Christ’s Compassion in the south of England, and was targeting various churches round the country, including his own, to find potential members. And that is why, when Black told him he was organizing a weekend conference down south and had invited several key members of Edmund’s church, including my mum, the unwitting pastor encouraged everyone to go along for what he said promised to be a fulfilling Christian experience.

Mum was obviously keen to go to the conference and told us enthusiastically that Pastor Collins believed it would be a place where people could feel the presence of God. She tried to persuade us all to join her, but Dad was indifferent to the offer and turned her down. Kerry said she would travel up from Southampton University, where she was studying occupational therapy, to join Mum. I was happy to be with Mum too. The conference took place in a spacious market hall and there were about 150 of us.

Mum and I loved our time away. We stayed in the home of Celia and Patrick Jones, who were founder members of the Society of Christ’s Compassion; they were the parents of a girl, Carol, and the aunt and uncle – and guardians – of Peter, whose parents had been killed in a boating accident some years previously. They made us feel so welcome. Nothing was too much trouble for them and they were really good at putting us at our ease. I immediately hit it off with Peter, who was several years older than me, little thinking that before many years had passed we would become husband and wife.

The highlight of the weekend for me wasn’t a religious one, but when Peter, helped by Carol, pushed me in a large old pram at top speed round and round the family’s vast garden. Later that day he and I were left alone in the kitchen and ended up having a food fight with some cakes. It all got very silly and Celia was briefly quite angry at the mess we’d made. We quickly apologized.

Mum was really moved by how friendly and loving everyone was. She really took to Celia too, and spent ages pouring her heart out to her about Roy. But most of all she was mesmerized by Black’s powerful presence. She found him charismatic and his sermons overwhelmingly authoritative. He told us all that we needed to be where God is and that He had chosen her to be in his church. She believed him and it made her feel special to be there.

I liked the sense of community and the fact that everyone seemed very happy. But I was very scared of Black, particularly when he implied that a local woman, who was an important figure in the Church, had contracted lung cancer because she had criticized Black and that God had given her the illness as a punishment. I was also scared of Black’s aloofness and the way he stared at me.

Kerry, who stayed with another couple, was less enthusiastic. She thought Black was distant and cold, and disliked the belittling and intimidating way he talked to her. She also disliked the way the prayer meetings dragged on and on. She wondered whether part of the reason for this was to exhaust the congregation and make them more emotional as a way of putting the fear of God in them and inducing them to become members of the Church. Mum didn’t want to hear her criticisms, and came home feeling stronger and more able to cope with her difficult life.

That summer, Roy decided to leave the squat and return to live at home. Initially, we all tried to make him feel welcome and hoped we would be a united and close family again. Tragically his behaviour was even worse than before. He behaved so peculiarly that we were all scared stiff of him. None of us could relax for a second and the tension in the household quickly became unbearable. My parents feared the long-term damage the strange atmosphere would have on us all, and how it would affect our lives as adults. Dad, who had always looked out for us, began to suffer from the same symptoms of stress and panic that had marked the start of his nervous breakdown.

He felt on the verge of collapse and told Mum that if Roy stayed permanently he feared he would become ill again. Mum was beside herself with worry. On impulse she rang one of her friends from Bethesda Charismatic Church, who immediately invited us to come and stay with her family. We accepted her offer and Mum, Dad and I all trooped over and slept in the spare room. It was a crush but at least we felt more sane. After a week Roy was fed up with being on his own and returned to the squat, so we moved back home. The house was in chaos and it took days to get it clean and tidy again.

Unfortunately Roy kept coming back and on one occasion in the middle of the night he went downstairs and turned all of the gas stoves on. Dad, who was an insomniac, smelled the gas and rushed downstairs before anything serious happened. Mum got me out of the house to some other good people from the Church. She and Dad bravely stayed with Roy, and when he calmed down he told them he wanted to move to a larger squat in a bigger town, ‘away from small-town life’. In desperation she rang Pastor Collins. Edmund didn’t seem to mind how late it was and offered to ask a couple of people from the congregation to drive Roy to wherever he wanted to go. Mum said she would be very grateful, so he rang them immediately. They didn’t hesitate to take him on the two-hour car journey. Dad was amazed at their generosity and it ignited something deep inside him.

Roy settled in his new squat and shortly afterwards Dad told Mum he wanted to come to church with her. It was a real turnaround for him, because although he had always considered himself to be a Christian in the way he went about his life, he had been very sceptical about the Church as an institution. He thought it was full of hypocrites who went there when it was good for business. But the way so many of the Bethesda Church members selflessly helped with Roy was a true eye-opener and he was overwhelmed by their kindness. He decided to find out more about this Church, particularly as it was having such a positive effect on Mum.

Dad attended a few services and it wasn’t long before he told Mum he could feel that there was someone else in charge and that all situations could be overcome through Him, and that he too wanted to become a Christian. Mum was thrilled and the next time Black came to preach Dad went along to listen. He expected to be very impressed, but was not and instead found him overbearing and insincere. He didn’t want to upset Mum as she was going through so much with Roy, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

Mum was meanwhile keeping a much bigger secret from him. At a recent community charity event Black had whispered a few words into Edmund Collins’s ear implying that Dad had sexually interfered with me. Pastor Collins quietly passed this information on to Mum, adding that he was sure it wasn’t true. Mum knew it was a total lie and although she didn’t mention anything to me, she was absolutely right. My wonderful father had never been anything other than appropriately loving towards me.

It was instead an example of Black’s trouble-making and his sly way of setting one member of a family against another. Mum kept this dark secret from Dad for twenty years, partly because she knew it was nonsense and partly because she didn’t want him to stop being a Christian. Luckily Dad’s new-found joy in religion wasn’t dimmed by his low opinion of Black, so much so that once he started going to church regularly he found the answers to his prayers. About a year after Roy left to go to his new squat, we were phoned by the police to say he had created such a scene in the street that he had been arrested and sectioned. It had happened before and each time he was taken into hospital he was merely given a dose of some sort of tranquillizer and discharged again.

This time he was again taken to hospital, and Mum and Dad rushed there to see him. When they arrived his first words to them were, ‘I am so sorry.’ He had never shown any awareness of his effect on the family before and sounded like a totally different Roy. He continued to be so apologetic for all the trouble he had caused that both Mum and Dad burst into tears. Once they calmed down they went to speak to his consultant, who told them that Roy was suffering from bipolar illness. He had been ill for ten years with all the classic symptoms and it was only now that anyone had offered a proper medical diagnosis. They both believed that it was something God had facilitated.

Roy remained in hospital for about a month and was found supported accommodation, where he has lived ever since. He takes mood-stabilizing medication to control his condition and manages his simple life. Support staff help him with daily tasks and activities, and check he is OK. He phones me once a day and my parents about six times, which is sometimes quite stressful for them, but he needs reassurance that we are still there for him.

Once Dad became a committed Christian he stopped both drinking and smoking, and family life dramatically changed as a result of their new religious beliefs. We stopped going to the more riotous parties, gave up playing cards and barely watched TV. Instead my parents’ social life revolved around Bible-study groups, going to church and the occasional weekend conference arranged by the Society of Christ’s Compassion.

I was still only in my early teens, but the dramatic changes went down like a lead balloon with me. When Mum went to church before Dad became a Christian she was very discreet about religion and made sure it didn’t dominate the house. But suddenly Bibles were everywhere and my parents now played only religious music or recordings of sermons. It was so different from our previous home life and I found it suffocating.

I also felt resentful that they made new rules for me that hadn’t applied to my sister Kerry. She had had lots of freedom and fun, but just as I was old enough to join in, everything disappeared. Mum and Dad were trying to get me to go to church all the time, which I certainly didn’t want to do. I was so cross that it didn’t take long for my rebellious spirit to emerge. In most other households I would have been seen as a fairly typical teenager, but because of what my parents had gone through with Roy, which for years one doctor after another had attributed to youthful rebellion, my general stroppiness seemed far worse than it was.

I had always loved my parents and was basically a decent child, but having endured a pressure-cooker atmosphere at home for so long, I needed to let off steam. Also the change of regime at home, which suddenly switched from being easy-going to strict, occurred at just the wrong time for a lively adolescent girl.

My first teenage rebellion was to become a hippie and I began wearing paisley kaftans, tie-dyed T-shirts and a long Afghan coat that was impregnated with patchouli oil. I also started smoking, like most of my friends. At that time I was a pupil at the local comprehensive school and smoked behind the shed during school hours with a group of friends and, later on, in some derelict woodland once classes were over.

There were some difficult and disruptive children at the school and I knew Mum and Dad were worried about their influence on me. They were right, but the small voice inside me was always aware of what was right and wrong. It was just that at the time it was outweighed by my longing for fun. I started lying to them. I’d say I was staying overnight with a friend and instead went with a gang of about four or five to the woods and stayed up all night drinking and smoking. At about 6 a.m. the next morning we’d all return home bleary-eyed, smelling of fags and cider.

One day as we lay in a clearing in the woods, we made a pact to steal trinkets from the gift shop in the village. It was a ridiculous and horribly dishonest thing to do, not least because the community was very small and everyone knew everyone else. I wanted to back out, but as none of us dared make the first move, I went along too and we all lifted some jewellery. Not surprisingly, a day later a policeman turned up at my home and demanded I hand back what I had taken. I went to my bedroom where I had hidden it all but cheekily decided to give him only half of my haul. Two days later he returned and asked for the rest. This time I handed everything over. My parents were mortified and I was lucky the shop didn’t press charges. Instead, Dad took me down to the police station and made me stand in front of the local senior officer, who gave me a severe talking-to. I was very submissive, felt thoroughly ashamed and said I would never do it again.

Even at the time I could tell that my bad behaviour was a reaction to both what had happened at home with Roy and mixing with the wrong crowd. I felt awful about letting Dad down, as he was such a loving father and worked so hard for us. Because of all of this I never shoplifted again. Instead I started playing truant, which I am not proud of either. Mum didn’t notice anything when I went out in the morning at the right time in my school uniform but with a pair of jeans or a long skirt stuffed into my satchel. Once I was out of sight I changed direction and met some friends who were also skipping school and we would go off for the day. I even had the cheek to phone the school secretary and, pretending to be my mother, said I had a bad cold and managed to stay away for a week.

Eventually Mum noticed that my school uniform wasn’t getting dirty and that I never had any homework. When she challenged me I admitted I had been skipping school. She was so worried about me that she gave up her part-time secretarial job so she could be at home to keep an eye on me. The problem was, I didn’t have either the incentive or the discipline to work, as I felt I could never perform as well as my high-achieving sister.

Around this time I started having boyfriends and pretty soon I lost my virginity. I even tried sniffing glue. With a group of friends I went to our woodland haunt where I poured some Tippex correction fluid into a plastic bag and breathed in the fumes. Fortunately, I quickly realized it was a very dangerous thing to do and stopped immediately, although I experienced a brief ‘high’ followed by a crashing headache. I never tried it again nor touched any other drug, despite my attempt to look and behave like a hippie.

I further disgraced myself when I was invited to a birthday party in a local hall by one of the sixth-form girls at school. I was much younger than nearly everyone else there and when the other guests started dancing I went round sipping their alcoholic drinks. It was a mad thing to do and I ended up being terribly sick in the ladies’ loo. My timing was terrible because there was a police raid just as I was throwing up. They were obviously looking for drugs and under-age drinkers, and when they found me in the toilets they rang my father. He came to pick me up but refused to say one word to me during the half-hour drive home. He didn’t have to. His look of disapproval was enough. Once we were home he said curtly, ‘I will speak to you in the morning, young lady.’ I went to bed feeling ill and stupid. Next morning Dad gave me a thorough telling-off. I knew my behaviour had been wrong and I felt ashamed that I had embarrassed my parents.

Mum and Dad remained very worried about me, and although it was obvious that I was not mentally ill, after all they had gone through with Roy they couldn’t face another spell of adolescent bad behaviour and the resulting tension at home.

Meanwhile Black’s Society of Christ’s Compassion was going from strength to strength and had grown to approximately 250 members. He wanted to expand further and so opened a new church building in the south of England, together with a school, in a derelict warehouse on the edge of town. The warehouse was bought with a combination of a large inheritance that Black had recently come into by way of a childless Scottish uncle and donations from nearly all of the church members (Black told his congregation that their gift was a way of thanking God for the blessing of faith). The school was called Tadford School, to tally with the new name that Black had chosen for the church – Tadford Charismatic Church.

That July Mum and Dad decided to go to the church’s weekend conference. I didn’t want to go as it sounded much too boring but they refused to let me stay at home on my own, or go to a friend. They didn’t trust me. I made such a fuss that Mum asked Pastor Collins what she should do. He told her firmly to insist I come too and she told me I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I was so furious and upset that I cried throughout the five-hour drive down south to the church. We arrived late on Friday afternoon and pitched our tent in a temporary campsite in an area of wasteland near to the church, which Black used whenever there was a large weekend meeting. It was a grim place and I was still sulky, telling my parents I didn’t want to go to any of the Church meetings. Mum said that was OK.

So the next morning I wondered off on my own and had a sneaky cigarette while they were praying. Later that day Mum said Ian Black insisted I come to the evening meeting in the church. I tried arguing but it was hopeless. I trailed along with them to the redeveloped warehouse dressed completely inappropriately. I had put my hippie period behind me and now sported a skimpy black top and very short miniskirt that just about covered my Union Jack knickers, which I had made myself. Inside the warehouse there was a garish floral carpet and row upon row of orange plastic chairs, which were filling up rapidly. There must have been at least three hundred people present. At one end there was a stage and I felt that perhaps we were all going to watch a performance. I was not far wrong.

It was very hot and stuffy in the warehouse-cum-church and I felt very bored. I made the point, as young teenagers do, of making sure my parents knew I didn’t want to be there. I refused to stand up when everyone else did to pray loudly or sing. Nor did I join in. Instead I looked around and recognized a few faces from my visit to the Black’s previous church with Mum when I was much younger, but I didn’t acknowledge anyone. In total contrast to me, my parents were obviously captivated, as were most of the congregation. I must have stuck out like a sore thumb.

We had to go through the same routine on Sunday evening, by which time I was so hot and uncomfortable that I suddenly decided I couldn’t take any more. Despite the fact that I was sitting in the middle of a long row and being stared at by Black I got up, squeezed my way through to the end and ran out towards our tent in the temporary campsite. Olivia, who was the wife of the senior pastor, Hugh Porter, ran after me and asked in a doom-laden, intimidating way whether I realized that if I didn’t return I would go to Hell. I was so shocked by her words that I started crying and then let her march me straight back into the church again. The entire congregation had seen how I behaved and my parents were obviously very embarrassed.

Black then seized the moment by asking the congregation to pray for me and led the prayers himself. They were all about saving me, not letting me go to Hell and trying to cast out my ‘rebellious spirit’, which according to 1 Samuel 15:23 is called the sin of witchcraft. I had never been involved in any sort of witchcraft and found the whole thing terrifying. My parents were traumatized too. They knew that to have a daughter labelled as rebellious was a very serious stigma within the Church and kept their heads bowed in shame. I sat quietly next to them, hoping desperately that Black would focus on someone or something else, but when he finished the prayers he said there was someone in the congregation who should go to the new Church school and called out my name.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and felt a mixture of shock, fury and embarrassment. Black then called me to the front and, with three hundred people’s eyes fixed on me, prayed over me yet again. He reeked of Brut aftershave and I really didn’t like him. The prayer meeting finished shortly afterwards and I asked my parents what was going on.

Unbeknown to me, my fate had already been sealed the previous day. Mum and Dad had been taken to one side on Saturday morning by Black and the Canadian evangelist Troy Tyson’s nephew, Charles, another visiting preacher, and told that they should leave me behind so that I could go to Tadford School. I am convinced the whole thing was premeditated. The school was in its first year and only had fourteen pupils aged between 4 and 18.

My parents were warned by Black and Charles Tyson that my bad behaviour was a certain sign that I was on the road to Hell. They were told that I was in mortal danger unless they moved fast and put me in the care of the Church. It was stressed that there was not a moment to lose and that my situation was so desperate that they shouldn’t under any circumstances even take me home with them to collect my things. My only chance of salvation was for me to be left behind immediately.

It was Dad’s first visit to Tadford and he decided to talk to Pastor Collins, who was also at the conference, before making such an important and radical decision. Edmund told him it was the best thing that could possibly happen, that it had come from the Lord and was a wonderful opportunity for me. This was a view he later fully acknowledged that he bitterly regretted. Dad’s qualms vanished. Not only did he admire Pastor Edmund, but he was also impressed by the Tadford Church members, who he said were the most devoted, loving people he had ever met. He and Mum were shown round the school. It was housed at one end of the warehouse, where swing doors led to the newly built classrooms. Dad was told that Black had started the school in response to the declining Christian, moral and educational standards that were apparent in the state schools.

The Church had a firm Statement of Faith and members were required to believe in a long list of tenets, such as the Virgin Birth, the Second Coming, the depravity of human nature and a number of other things that meant very little to me but which mostly sounded terrifying. Despite my total opposition to the idea, Dad liked the fact that all the teachers were Christians and thought it was a good, clean, godly environment. Although there was something about Black that made Dad feel uneasy and he couldn’t warm to him, he decided not to tell Mum and instead tried to put it to one side because he was so impressed by everyone else.

Mum told me that Black suggested I stay at the school for two years and was so persuasive that she and Dad felt that, if they didn’t agree, they would be going against what God wanted. I tried to insist I would not change schools, but it soon became obvious that they had made up their minds. I then pleaded with them to take me home so I could collect my things. I had only brought with me what I needed for the weekend, but they refused. I felt frightened, both of being left behind and of all the talk about going to Hell.

My parents stayed on for a couple of days to sort me out for my new life. My miniskirt and tight jeans were completely unsuitable for a Church school and Black told Mum to take me shopping in town for some new clothes. I ended up with a small selection of ghastly, demure three-quarter-length skirts and dresses, long-sleeved blouses with high necks and thick stockings, all of which were designed to make me look respectable and modest. I was not allowed to have jeans or trousers because Black apparently believed they were not ladylike. I hated everything, and felt I was losing my individuality. Instead of being a distinctive teenager I looked like Mary Poppins.

But I didn’t make a terrible scene. It was all much too serious and I was in shock. Instead, I did what I was told and behaved like a robot. After our shopping trip Mum and I came back to the church to buy the school uniform. This consisted of a grey pleated skirt with a white blouse, a maroon blazer with grey trim to match the skirt, a grey coat and a maroon hat, also with a grey trim. It was all hideous. I felt terribly upset that I was not allowed to go home to say goodbye to my friends or boyfriend, who I was particularly keen on, or collect my books, diary and special things.

My parents left on Wednesday morning and I was in floods of tears as they hugged me and said goodbye. I have since learnt that lots of questionable organizations, selling anything from double glazing and commemorative china to religion, often target people and pressurize them into making quick commitments. They persuade them that, unless they make a fast decision, they will lose the chance to take advantage of whatever is on offer.

But, at Tadford on that bleak Sunday in July when my fate and future were about to be sealed, neither of my parents felt under duress, nor were they the slightest bit suspicious of any ulterior motive on the part of Black. Mum had looked round the school, seen well-mannered children and thought that it would be the ideal thing for me. She had always wanted me to have the best opportunities in life and thought that here was my chance.

For my parents it was a hard decision and a sacrifice to leave me behind, both emotionally and financially. Mum even went back to work full-time to pay for my schooling. She also told Black that she wanted me to come home during half-term and the school holidays, and at most stay for a year, but I didn’t know that. Nor did she realize I would be one of only two boarders.

In the cold light of the long car journey home, neither of them felt quite so confident about what they had done. Mum felt guilty and inadequate at not being able to manage me, and about passing me on to somebody else what she felt was really her problem. Dad just felt terrible. They talked about what had happened all the way back. Neither of them slept that night, while several hundred miles away I cried myself to sleep.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.